A question about tuning.
 

Is a load bearing dyno an absolute must? What if I had a road that had a pretty good length with not stop signs for miles upon miles. The reason I ask is I have no idea where there is a local shop that will dyno tune my car. There's R&E racing, but they're a bunch of racist pushrod lovers... and just north of me there's a road called Baccus Road or Bacchus Road. Long, straight, no stops. I believe Reeves Callaway took one of his Vette projects out there to 223 mph and a BMW tuner I knew a while back used to do top speed runs out there. And it's pretty flat too.

Also, I forgot to mention I'm not looking for 250 hp and shit. Maybe between 180-210 rwhp.

Uh dude you will be just fine. just set the timming conservatively, and you will be fine.

you can autotune pretty decently on a dynojet. you just wont get a lot of the map. unless you do a WOT run, then a 1/2 WOT run etc.

You can tune fuel ok on the road with alot of time invested. You'll never get the timing right, with a TON of time invested, math, datalogging, you can get close maybe, at WOT at least. It's dangerous though....

You'll also never get the partial throttle areas of your timing map right on the road, you simply can't. It's the harder part of dyno tuning for a few reasons (time consuming, heat issues, etc) and pretty much impossible on the road.

Yes a load bearing dyno is required to do it correctly. Yes I own one, but I've been saying this for far longer and I wouldn't have spent the money if I could just do it on the street just as well....

My car's never seen a dyno, and I'm happy with the tune. I'm sure that I could pick up a few hp with proper dyno tuning, but at $150/hr, I really doubt it would be worth it. Comparing my 1/8th mi. MPH with the other miatas on dragtimes, I'm very pleased with the power it's making.

That's just it though, it's not just about peak hp. With a proper tune, you'll have more torque all across the curve, starting as early as just off idle. And that's just talking WOT. At part throttle, where you spend much of your time driving around, the car will be smoother, more responsive, and torquier.

It's one of those things you just don't understand until you've experienced. Don't take this the wrong way, but I bet I could change your outlook on this in a very fun way, fun for you I mean ;).

Granted, you guys have a big help in our MSPNP base map which has an excellent timing map for an N/A car, but depending on your motor and turbo setup, you may ping like crazy with that map too, even when not in boost, it's hard to say. I just tuned Stan's SC car and it needed less timing everywhere under 100kpa compared to my N/A map, but it's spot on everywhere now and running awesome.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right, but I'm just not upset enough with the car's performance to spend about $300-450 to find out how much better it could be.

Jerry, I've played around with brake-boosting and running through each cell of the fuel map while keeping the RPM constant or damn close to it, just like I watched you do on the load bearing dyno. Any worth to doing something like that?

Fuel, you can do OK on the street with a fair amount of time invested; spark, not so much.... And ignition is where all the power is.

I believe it.

Jerry, have you had the opportunity to tune a car with an intercooler and water injection yet? I've been toying with the idea of adding a progressive Devil's Own kit to my setup to try and crack 250whp. I don't fancy pushing the car much past where I am now (15psi), but I know I'm leaving some timing on the table from the piss-water they call high-octane gas out here.